Galileo’s Telescope

Galileo’s Telescope

In 1609 the telescope was a new instrument, though it is not clear just how new it was. Galileo heard that some Dutch lens grinder had combined two lenses in a way that magnified distant objects; he tried various combinations himself and quickly produced a low-power telescope of his own. Then he did something which, apparently, no one had done before; he directed his glass to the heavens, and the result was astounding. Every observation disclosed new and unsuspected objects in the sky. Even when the telescope was directed to familiar celestial objects, the sun, moon, and planets, remarkable new aspects of these old friends were discovered. Galileo, who had been a Copernican for some years before he knew of the telescope, managed to turn each new discovery into an argument for Copernicanism.

The telescope’s first disclosure was the new worlds in the firmament about which Donne, only two years later complained. Wherever he turned his glass, Galileo found new stars. The population of the most crowded constellations increased. The Milky Way, which to the naked eye is just a pale glow in the sky (it had frequently been explained as a sublunary phenomenon, like comets, or as a reflection of diffused light from the sun and moon) was now discovered to be a gigantic collection of stars, too dim and too little separated to be resolved by the naked eye. Overnight the heavens were crowded by countless new residents. The vast expansion of the universe, perhaps its infinitude, postulated by some of the Copernicans, seemed suddenly less unreasonable. Bruno’s mystical vision of a universe whose infinite extent and population proclaimed the infinite procreativeness of the Deity was very nearly transformed into a sense datum.